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Hypnotherapy and ThetaHealing Compared
After receiving several inquiries as to the nature of ThetaHealing and why a hypnosis school would be offering it, I decided to address this question here.
Although there is a vast amount of information online about hypnotherapy, what it’s used for, and how it works, it is still very misunderstood. One reason for this is that hypnosis is not one thing: some hypnotic states involve relaxation, others remove physical pain, and the most common are those in which individuals take suggestion or command easily and without critical thought. A skilled hypnotherapist will have the ability to induce any of these hypnotic trances for healing, goal achievement, and change.
ThetaHealing is a relatively new energy healing modality, or technique. It involves inducing in the practitioner an altered state (hence the connection to hypnosis) whereby intuition is increased. From this state of expanded awareness, the practitioner is able to intuit and release energy blockages, limiting belief patterns, and stuck emotional states.
So, the connections between the two techniques are this: (1) both involve altered states, (2) in hypnotherapy the client is hypnotized, but in ThetaHealing the practitioner is in trance, (3) both work on belief and emotional patterns, (4) ThetaHealing shifts energy, while hypnosis supports mental changes.
For these reasons, many NLP’ers and hypnotherapists are adding ThetaHealing to their healing toolboxes and vice versa. Combining techniques provides more ways to address issues, insuring your work is permanent and profound.
Please feel free to post additional questions on either technique, and I will do my best to clarify as much as possible!
The Role of Hypnosis in Emotional Research
Only 20 years ago, researchers were under the impression that emotions and feelings originated with the heart and so could not be measured scientifically. In more recent years, however, science has proven that emotions play a major role in a person’s overall health. One non-invasive way to study feelings and emotions is through the use of hypnotherapy and brain images.
Emotions are a result of how individuals perceive their experiences. These perceptions, or thoughts, are based on a person’s past experience, which is rooted in the unconscious mind. This means, essentially, that the unconscious transmits a signal to the conscious mind telling it how to feel about a particular experience.
In a recent study, hypnotic suggestion was used to induce specific emotions. Then, the researchers looked at how the various emotional states affected pain. They found negative emotions such as fear and sadness increased the level of perceived pain in participants. When certain positive emotions were hypnotically induced, they did not continue to increase. Reported pain also lessened.
Other studies have used hypnosis on the study of emotions using both highly suggestible and less suggestible participants. When highly suggestible participants were given hypnotic suggestions to be unaffected by either positive or negative emotions, researchers found that the suggestions were able to produce a numbing affect on their emotions. The highly suggestible participants also experienced more emotional numbing, but both groups experienced lowered response (Rainville, 2002).
The study of hypnotic suggestions plays a positive role in studying emotion. It gives researchers insight into what emotions to induce. By studying both highly suggestible and less suggestible individuals, hypnosis is paving the way to greater understanding of the mind, emotions, and the body.
